On Reflexion - what we've been thinking...

Influencing the Influencers

There's no doubt that trusted advisers and influencers have a vital role to play throughout the B2B buying process, but they have a particularly role to play during two key phases in the buyer's journey: firstly when the prospect organisation decides that they need to do something, and again when they decide what to do.

The balance of power has shifted over the years: it's becoming increasingly common for the prospect to initiate the sales conversation with the vendor, rather than the other way around.  Vendors cannot rely on finding buyers once they are "in the market"; they have to ensure that they get found by them - or are already connected, directly or through the prospect's trusted network.

We've conducted a number of buyer's journey studies for clients in which we help them understand how and why their prospects choose to buy.  We pay particular attention to the trigger events that catalyse the buying process, and how prospects search for potential solutions.

Clients are almost always surprised to find out who their prospects had turned to for advice before chosing to engage with the vendor.  They are often unaware of the intermediate connections - so they are unable to do anything to amplify their influence.

Your prospect's network of influencers needs to be aware of and predisposed to recommend your solutions before your prospect has their epiphany.  So here's the challenge: most "conventional" marketing approaches are really poor at building the right sort of connections with the influencers who really matter.

Conventional PR and advertising activities do little or nothing to help in the B2B world - a world in which reputation is far more important than brand. Fortunately, new techniques are emerging and proving to be highly effective.

We've been working closely with one organisation in particular that is pioneering active influencer marketing: www.influencer50.com.  I recommend that anyone with an interest in the subject - and I desire to build better connections with their prospects - to check them out.

The Cost of Inaction

It's clear that the current economic climate is causing a great of risk-averse behaviour on the part of B2B prospects.  More people are involved in the decision-making process, the buying cycle is taking longer, and many more deals seem to be getting stuck in neither a clear win or a loss, but in "no decision".

We're hearing that Q4 2008 is proving particularly tough for a number of organisations, with serious consequences for revenue production and forecast accuracy.  The effects have been compounded by the extended Christmas break - and there's no guarantee that momentum will be restored in the New Year - unless something changes.

It seems that prospects are less convinced by return on investment projections than they used to be - even a positive ROI may not stimulate a positive buying decision.  With all the emphasis on the avoidance of risk, I sense that a new factor is coming into play - "the cost of inaction".

The potential cost of inaction is driven by the consequences of the prospect deciding not to deal with a problem right now.  It's concerned with the risks associated with delay or with doing nothing - and it's a necessary complement in today's environment to calculating the ROI of a project.

Just as ROI calculations are most credible when they are co-created with the prospect, and built up through the course of the buying process, the same holds true for the cost of inaction.

Savvy sales people - and savvy sales organisations - are probing for the cost and consequence of inaction from an early stage of the buying process.  By exploring the impact of not dealing with the issue, they are in a better position to qualify out deals where there is a weak cost on inaction early on in the sales process.  Such deals rarely close in today's climate.

Equally important, where a well qualified opportunity exists, they are consciously building up both quantitative and qualitative evidence of the cost of inaction - and getting key members of the prospect's decision making team to acknowledge the risks of deciding to do nothing. 

Just as with ROI, it's possible to create tools to help the process along - and provide sales people with the ammunition they need to create a natural sense of urgency and to facilitate the prospect's buying process.

These tools are proving invaluable to companies who want to sell smarter by supporting the process of buying - please drop me a line if you would like to learn more.

Seeing through the "Window of Discontent"

Most of our clients come from B2B markets, with complex sales environments and are selling a discretionary product or service - in other words the prospect’s business could survive, even if not very well, without their offering.

Many of them complain about more people being involved in the decision making process, of a growing number of deals are ending in “no decision” - and of receiving RFPs which have another vendor’s fingerprints all over it.

And it’s not uncommon to hear them complain that sales cycles are lengthening - so some have decided to focus their prospecting efforts on organisations which are already in an active buying cycle. It a short-termist strategy, in more ways than one.

Here’s the problem: most B2B buying processes follow a fairly predictable pattern -

- At first, the prospect is untroubled and unaware they may have an issue
- Then something happens – we call them trigger events – to cause the prospect to become aware and concerned
- Someone then usually proceeds to informally investigate the problem and their options
- They may then decide to formally evaluate potential solutions, usually forming some sort of project team
- Having evaluated the available options they may move to shortlist potential vendors, ask for proposals and select their preferred solution
- They may then proceed to negotiate contracts
- And eventually become a customer

Of course, the prospect can choose to abandon the process at any stage.

Most sales cycles are perceived to start at the investigating or evaluating stages, but the most critical opportunity for vendor influence is actually during what we call the “window of discontent” - the period between being unaware and having made a decision to investigate the problem.

Vendors who can observe – or, even better, cause – the trigger event have a much better chance of seizing the initiative, shaping the agenda and creating clear and lasting competitive advantage - and creating momentum in the deal that can have the effect of establishing urgency and shortening the buying cycle.

The “window of discontent” can be triggered by internal or external events - for example, changes in key legislation, mergers and acquisitions, or competitive actions that reshape the market landscape.

We coach our clients to identify key trigger events at both the market and company level, and to carefully focus their marketing efforts so as to align the prospect’s likely challenges and concerns with the vendor’s most useful and relevant capabilities.

The results have been impressive. By applying these principles, and focusing on the “window of discontent”, one such vendor managed to increase the number of qualified meetings their demand generation activities were creating by a factor of 5 - and the figure is still rising.

Sell more solutions by uncovering more urgent needs

Many vendors who have a B2B sales model are facing tighter end-user budgets—and buyers who are prepared only to invest in solving their most pressing business issues. Most B2B technology markets are also facing a declining number of "early adopters"; the vast majority of prospects are now behaving like mainstream buyers. They are demanding proven solutions to identified business problems.

Recognizing the danger in commoditized, undifferentiated markets, many vendors are determined to elevate themselves from selling products to offering solutions. It seems that the market for "solution selling" training courses, at least, has remained buoyant.

But according to everything I've been able to observe, this isn't a training issue, and most vendors who see it as such achieve disappointing results. The fundamental principle behind solution selling is that before you can offer a solution, your prospect has to acknowledge that the organization has a problem—and executives have to be motivated to do whatever it takes to solve it.

There's a common challenge here, unfortunately. It's unusual for vendors to ever believe that they have enough well-qualified leads, but at face value, they often seem to have reasonable pipelines. It's only when you dig into the detail that the problem emerges: a lack of buyer urgency. Some sales methodologies refer to this as a lack of a "compelling event" that will cause the buyer to make a positive buying decision. As a result, deals hover in limbo, not making any real progress from one quarter to the next.

Salespeople sometimes—often with increasing frequency toward quarter end—attempt to create an artificial compelling event by offering time-dependent discounts. I've found that prospects have become much more professional in their procurement processes over the past few years, and they can see this technique coming from miles away. These offers shift power into the hands of the buyer, usually to the lasting disadvantage of the salesperson involved.

The challenge to the selling organization, then, is to find ways of selling more solutions, and defending your value as a vendor, by uncovering more truly urgent needs. This requires a joined-up approach to the marketing and sales process. Without this, it's very hard to make the necessary progress.

Buyer's journey
We have found mapping out the "buyer's journey" to be an excellent starting point. Through a combination of in-depth surveys of existing customers and past prospects and workshops with the vendor's own customer-facing staff, we are able to identify the key steps that their typical prospects go through in their buying decision, the people who tend to be involved and the factors that matter most to them at each stage.

In all B2B sales of high-value offerings we've ever evaluated, the buying process is complex and passes through multiple stages. It's unrealistic to expect a sale to be closed on the first call, so it's particularly important to understand what it would take the buyer to move each time to the next stage in the organization's particular buying process.

Understanding what drives these transitions from one stage to the next is critical to driving the buying process. We call this "facilitating the next commitment." At each stage, we're keen to discover what the buying team needs to know before team members are comfortable with moving forward to the next stage.

In mapping these journeys, we have found one of the critical factors to be the "cost of inaction." We coach our clients' salespeople to ask a couple of critical questions:

1. What has prevented you from addressing the problem before, and what has changed now?
2. What would be the consequences of not dealing with the problem at this time?

Taken together, these questions are great predictors of the true urgency of the issue—and the likelihood of a short sales cycle. The salesperson often uncovers structural issues that are going to prevent a sale from being made in the short term, but equally they can uncover truly urgent motivations that can accelerate the sale.

One recent client has incorporated the above questions into a formal opportunity quality assessment process that seeks to systematically distinguish between prospects that have defined "urgent" needs from those who were merely "interested." My client is finding that those prospects who are prepared to acknowledge a clear cost of inaction are proving to have a significantly higher (300 percent to 400 percent) chance of closure in the current quarter than those who struggle to define one.

These questions force the "champions" within the prospect to think, as well. Once they have a clearer sense of the true cost of inaction, they often drive their own internal approval processes with greater focus, vigor and effectiveness. In one recent case, with only a little prompting, the prospect was able to monetize the cost of poor customer service by projecting the five-year impact of the organization's current unsatisfactory customer renewal rates.

We encourage clients to use what they have learned to create issues-based campaigns that are designed to focus on matters that are likely to be urgent, rather than merely interesting, to their target market—and that are associated with a clear "cost of inaction." We also work with them to create sales tools and collateral that have the specific purpose of addressing common buyer concerns as the prospect considers whether to take the buying process to the next stage.

To offer a solution, first you have to identify a problem. And to win a sale, you first have to convince the buyer of the cost of inaction.